Majella Munro, 2009

Dada, MAVO and the Japanese Avant-Garde: A prologue to the introduction of Surrealism to Japan

Majella Munro

Abstract This paper examines Dada influence on the 1920s avant-garde in Japan, considered as a prehistory to the introduction of Surrealism. This paper has two aims. The first is to justify a reading of Japanese Surrealist radicalism in terms of artistic, rather than social, revolt, by tracing anti-academic tendencies within the Japanese avant-garde from its inception. A lack of political radicalism in Japanese Surrealism is usually explained through claims that the wartime state was ideologically repressive and inhibited the kind of free, critical expression supposedly found in French Surrealist work. By looking at avant-garde production from the very early twenties, it is possible to chart the waning of interest in socio-political concerns to before the outbreak of the China (1937-41) or Pacific wars (1941-45), undermining the premise that an interest in artistic rather than political radicalism was a particular feature of the late thirties and early forties. The second aim is to explain the art historical quotation deployed by some Japanese Dadaists and Surrealists as part of a trend within the Japanese avant-garde, not as a misunderstanding or corruption of modernist ideals, as it is usually held to be.1 By examining ways in which Japanese Dadaists blended their production with the iconographies and philosophies of Zen Buddhism, this paper creates a framework in which a turn to tradition and art historical precedent can be reconciled with innovative modernist practice.

Introduction

In histories of French Surrealism, the continuities and conflicts which allowed Surrealism to develop from the remnants of Dada are familiar and well documented, yet in the Japanese case Dada is rarely considered as an antecedent to Surrealism. It is the reasons for and consequences of this neglect that this paper seeks to uncover. Dada is not considered to have flourished in Japan until after the Second World War. Whilst this omission of the pre-war movement may have connections to Occupation ideologies following Japan's defeatideologies which claimed that there could be no free, avant-garde expression until General Douglas MacArthur's

administration brought liberal democracy to the troubled countryit is also undeniably true that the pre- and post-war Japanese Dada movements were rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 1

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radically different in scope, organisation and measure. The jubilant experimentations of post-war Neo-Dada, Gutai and Japanese Fluxus participants achieved critical acclaim internationally; in marked contrast to a very limited interest in Japanese Dada during the 1920s, on the part of both contemporary practitioners and later scholars.

The reasons for the limited take-up of Dada are interesting in themselves. Partly, the rapid introduction of Surrealism by 1926 overshadowed interest in Dada whilst it was still a burgeoning movement in Japan, where the earliest Dada experiments dated from 1921. Additionally, while plenty of avant-garde groups were interested in Dada, this was subsumed by and melded with other imported western avant-garde currents; including, most notably,

Constructivism, which entered Japan alongside Dada. Junzaburo Nishiwaki (1894-1982), the poet who introduced Surrealism to Japan, defined the term 'Surrealism' by explaining that This rather inclusive name subsumes members of what used to be called cubism or dada [...],2 therefore justifying tracing a lineage between Dada and Surrealism, and also revealing much about Dada's existence as a hybrid cubo-futurist avant-garde movement in Japan. One such hybrid group, MAVO, a futurist-constructivist-dadaist collective, will form the basis of this paper, whilst the oeuvre of Takahashi Shinkichi (1901-87), the only pre-war Japanese practitioner to openly affiliate his work with an orthodox, Tzara-esqu Dadaism, will form a point of comparison.3

The Dadaist elements of both MAVO and Shinkichi's works are overlooked. In the case of MAVO, this is due to their combination of styles and their dislike of aesthetic orthodoxy, making their practice resistant to definition as Dadaist. Meanwhile, Shinkichi's archaicism (by which I mean his interest in traditional tropes and Buddhist beliefs) is felt to debase the modernism of his Dadaist practice. These aspectsthe blending with Constructivism, and an interest in traditional culturecould give both Shinkichi and MAVO's work the appearance of lying outside the scope of Dada, but this would depend on conceptualising a Dadaist orthodoxy, a scholarly construct which would in itself be unsympathetic to the character of the movement. Amalgamation with rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 2

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Constructivism was not specific to Japan, but was common to the avant-garde internationally, as Dawn Ades has argued in connection with the work of Hans Richter and other European Dada-Constructivists.4 In fact, not only do these two instances of synthesis fail to detract from the avant-garde impact of MAVO and Shinkichi's work, but it is within these apparent deviations that their most significant legacies for Surrealism can be found. Anti-academic practice, stylistic plurality and archaicism are the respective contributions of MAVO and Shinkichi to Japanese Surrealism. While there was no Dada movement as such in Japan for Surrealism to derive from, as it did in France, interest in Dada nonetheless exerted influence. Shz Takiguchi, the leading theorist of the Japanese Surrealist movement, described Dada and Surrealism as having a successive relationship. There were also some common practitioners, including the poet Kitasono Katsue (1902-78), who had produced a DadaistAnarchist magazine, Ge Girrigigam Prr Gimgem, before affiliating his poetics to Surrealism. According to the scholar Toshiharu Omuka,5 Ge Girrigigam Prr Gimgem represented a metaphysical, non-radical Dada which was an important influence on the political development of Surrealism in Japan.6 Thus the less anarchic, less activist, less politically engaged character of Japanese Surrealism relative to other Surrealist movements internationally may not be due to the historical context of totalitarianism, but could be the legacy of the aestheticised Dada which was its immediate predecessor.7 Omuka's observations provide a starting point for enquiry into the immediate artistic contexts of Japanese Surrealism, restoring the role of cultural context in a discourse which has been overshadowed by political concerns.

Discounting neglect of Japanese interest, the historiography of Dada as a whole does have particular strengths and subtleties that make it an excellent model for art-historical discussions of avant-gardism as a trans-national phenomenon. A commitment to avoiding orthodoxy gave Dada an aesthetic fluidity and an egalitarian aspect that allowed it not only to be absorbed by other styles (as it was in the case of the hybrid constructivism of MAVO) but also to spread internationally without hierarchy or bias.8 Movements emerged in Germany, France and Switzerland, operating as distinct and independent, but also as a trans-national collective, giving it a very different character to rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 3

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that imposed on the international spread of Surrealism by scholars, where the French movement is given a hegemonic precedence. These qualities make Dada's history difficult to recount, but also mean Dada serves as a better model for the dissemination of an international avant-garde movement in a way that is fractured, contentious and nuanced than the monolithic scholarly construct that is the history of Surrealism.

Shinkichi and Zen

In the Japanese case, this lack of codification allowed Dada to be understood in terms of, and synthesised with, indigenous cultural practices, most specifically Zen. There was good coverage of the emergence of Dada in Europe in Japanese news media and art journals from 1920, most of which linked it to Zen from the outset,9 and it was through such news reports that Dada first came to Shinkichi's attention. Aside from the link to Zen, there were other aspects of Japanese pre-modern art which had similarities to Dada. For Ko Won, the only scholar to examine the connection of Zen and Dada (in not only the Japanese but also the European cases), Dada is the decentralization of logical mind into "nonsensical" humour, paving the way to the movement of the absurd and automatism.10 But the use of nonsense, humour, and obscure language, accepted as Dadaist techniques, were familiar features of premodern popular culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as were changes in poetry which Won takes as evidence of the advent of modernism (such as the abandonment of syllable structures, and the use of vernacular language).11 Aside from these legacies, Zen is without doubt the most important domestic element informing Dada in Japan. While MAVO had their first exhibition in July 1923 at a Buddhist temple,12 Shinkichi became a novice monk in the Shingon sect in 1921. Based on his readings of Shinkichi's work, Won claims that:

Shinkichi [...] attributed the inception of Dada in Japan to the Buddhist background of certain Japanese and not to the chaotic and revolutionary milieu following the earthquake of 1923.13

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This not only points to an integration with the existing cultural context, but also provides an alternative narrative of the inception of avant-garde

experimentation. In most discourse on the Japanese avant-garde, the trauma of the Great Kanto Earthquake, in which nearly 150,000 people died, is used as an equivalent to the trauma of the Great War which provided a political backdrop to the emergence of a critical avant-garde in Europe, projecting a similarity of context onto the Japanese case. By dismissing citation of the earthquake, and instead looking at ways in which Japanese culture was ready and able to accept avant-garde movements, Shinkichi provides opportunity to re-evaluate avant-gardism in terms of art-historical and cultural development, avoiding parallelism and allowing scope for the history of avant-gardism in Japan to be discussed on its own terms. Indeed, Shinkichi's own Dada experiments predated Kanto by two years.

Shinkichi's Dadaist practice was, by his own admission, philosophically Buddhistic.14 His very first avant-garde poem Assertion is Dadaist, whilst being recognisably Dadaist in its construction and typographical layout, also explores Buddhist concepts and makes explicit reference to Buddha. Indeed, the influence of Dada on Zen Buddhists may have been reciprocal. Shinkichi's 1970 text Revival of Dada15 claims that Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference,16 following Tristan Tzara's (1896-1963) 1922 description of Dada as a return to a religion of quasi-Buddhistic indifference.17 Despite having given Zen a facilitating function in regard to Dada, for Shinkichi, Zen retained primacy as the movement of greatest importance and longevity. Dada was nothing other than a rudimentary version of Zen,18 a realisation that led to Shinkichi's abandonment of Dadaist practice in 1926.19

Zen Buddhism fostered its own tradition of art practice which was an antiaesthetic form of active meditation. The production of paintings based on economically rendered, monochromatic abstract forms; most usually the circlethe fundamental iconographic symbol of Zen artwas a way of distilling the activities of the conscious mind into a single gesture, an automatic process which sought to bypass the concerns of consciousness. rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 5

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Japanese avant-gardists such as Akira Kanayama (b.1924) were still producing abstracts based on the Zen circle in the late 1960s, thereby evidencing the continuity of a pre-modern abstraction within modernist practice.

Zen paintings are not made with artistic considerations in mind, but are the representational distillation of hours of thought and meditation. The paintings have unfinished, spontaneous and improvisational qualities, and, having emerged from the practise of calligraphy, rather than from painting proper, the tradition has an interdisciplinary origin, the goal of which was to subvert the conventions of verbal meaning. In Zen painting, therefore, automatic, anti-art and deconstructive elements are employed; all of which are techniques that are not only common to the practice of Dada and Surrealism, but which are in fact the core ideas of these two movements. While Zen painting may seem to present the apotheosis of values which are quintessentially and traditionally Japanese, Zen was in fact a counter-cultural movement in both China and Japan, as Stephen Addiss has pointed out.20 Zen was distinct from the official Confucian ideologies used to keep civic order during the Edo period in Japan (1603-1868), and was separate to the Shinto system of ancestor worship on which the Japanese Emperors based their divinity and their rule. Zen art was similarly an anti-establishment, anti-academic tradition, existing outside the mainstream of Japanese painting, being produced without patronage and unavailable for purchase through the art market.21

Despite these clear legacies for the avant-garde in existing Zen practice, the absorption of pre-modern referents by Surrealism is criticised by scholars. Tsuruoka Yoshihisa, one of the earliest Japanese scholars to examine Japanese Surrealism, complained that in place of French radicalism the Japanese retreated into premodern sentimentality,22 while William Gardner sees aestheticist orientalism within the Japanese avant-garde as complicit with Japanese imperialism,23 making art-historical quotation tantamount to collaboration with fascisman assessment which seems overdetermined and over-dramatic. Shinkichi's own hybrid output is received problematically because his Zen elements are opaque to Dada scholars, while his Dadaist rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 6

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aspects are of little interest to Zen poets and practitioners.24 Neglect of Shinkichi's status as a hybrid practitioner has therefore emerged from scholarly reception. One common cause of hostility to the incorporation of premodern culture is a belief that a work which is archaising cannot simultaneously be modernist; but the example of Surrealism, where the use of antique images by Max Ernst and Valentine Penrose amongst others is not seen as problematic, but is praised and understood dialectically, easily refutes complaints that a work cannot be both modern and historicising.

This refutation, while implicitly accepted in discourse on French Surrealism, is not applied to Japanese production. Hiroshi Nara, writing on the problematic development of modernism in the Japanese art world, has complained that what sells to the Western public is events that typify Japan's inability to modernize itself (from American perspectives) and its astonishing and incongruent cohabitation of elements from the past with twenty-first century artifacts [...]25 an idea which continues to inform Western perceptions of Japan and which is even self-consciously deployed by the Japanese. Tensions over whether reference to tradition is the antithesis of modernity or the lynchpin of national identity were not, therefore, specific to the early twentieth-century Japanese art world, but were the remnants of the selfconscious Western-orientated modernisation of the late nineteenth century, and continue to be of concern within Japanese geo-politics today. My argument is that this tension is not only the central problem of Japanese modernity, but is also that which makes the modern in Japan recognisably Japanese. Hiroshi counters a binary opposition of tradition and modernity by arguing that Japanese culture has always been synthetic. From the absorption of Buddhism from China to the western-orientated modernisation of the nineteenth century, Japanese culture has frequently and enthusiastically responded to foreign cultures whilst also maintaining a distinct national identity. Hiroshi explains that: at each stage when a [foreign] influence was brought in, the Japanese indigenised it by finding a place for it in their system of beliefs.26 Pioneering scholar of Japanese Surrealism Miryam Sas, who rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 7

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sought to chart properly the influences of French Surrealism on its Japanese counterpart, understood the transmutations of Surrealism in Japan in terms of misprision; that is, as a selective misunderstanding of the aims of the movement on the part of the Japanese. While Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence', which she cites may be an excellent tool for analysing artistic development within cultures, its usefulness for discussing exchange across cultures is questionable. In applying a model of synthetic indigenisation, I am advancing on Sas's misprision by re-presenting the transformation of Surrealist ideas not in terms of misreading, but as a response to cultural context. It should also be noted that the incorporation of elements from earlier art-historical epochs and styles is not unique to Japan but common to Surrealism internationally, and was also found in the French movement. Tensions between traditional and modern, national and international, are common to twentieth-century modern states, and were explored in a variety of regional Surrealist movements, precluding an interest in archaicism from being cited as evidence of a failed modernity or a derailed avant-garde. As Vra Lnhartov, a leading scholar of Japanese Surrealism, has observed, the Surrealist interest in universal values led to a disinterest in developing a codified aesthetic program,27 a disinterest which may be a legacy of Dada. Surrealism thus had the flexibility to assimilate cultural referents, allowing Surrealist painting to expand its visual vocabulary as it spread across the globe. Rather than representing a dissolution of Surrealist ideas, this incorporation is responsible for the remarkable aesthetic diversity of the movement. Just as the English Surrealist group had done in citing the English tradition of Romantic Literature as an influence on their practice, Japanese Surrealists sought indigenous antecedents for their production. However, this quest for synthesis with domestic culture had particular urgency in the Japanese case. In 1910, Kotar Takamura (1883-1956) published his highly influential essay Midori no Taiyo (Green Sun).28 In a critical response to the strong dependence of modern Japanese art on Western styles, Kotar posed the question of whether it was possible to be an international modernist without compromising one's Japanese identity. Takiguchi similarly urged the Surrealists to be equally mindful of both the ethnic purity and specificity of rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 8

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Japanese art and the historical turn in world art,29 and this discriminating, nativising reception of Western avant-gardes can be read as a response to Kotar's seminal writings, rather than to state demands, as Yoshihisa would have it. Yet there are some issues arising from the assimilation of the avant-garde in different cultural and political contexts which cannot easily be dismissed, and there are specific features of the Japanese case which dissipate the radicalism (whether political or purely formal) movements such as Dada expounded in the West. I have identified one key issue which I wish to use to shape this discussion: if Dada and Surrealism adopted a counter-position to European culture, and the Japanese Imperialistic state during the Second World War was critical of European culture, is the Europeanised avant-garde in Japan coming into line with state interests? Would such an alignment preclude this practice from being designated avant-garde? How can a critical position be negotiated between state nationalism and a desire to produce innovative and nationally distinctive, rather than derivatively Europeanised, work? The most significant characteristics of Dadaa denial of meaning, of existence and a dislike of post-enlightenment European culturedo not have the same critical currency in Japan as they do in the West, since their acceptance as part of the Zen tradition make them unremarkable rather than controversial. In fact, these differences in radicalism and reception were not specific to Dadaism in Japan. The impact that context has on reception becomes most apparent when looking at the various possible understandings of the term 'Dada'. In 1923 Takanori Kinoshita (1894-1973) and the Russian futurist David Burlick (1882-1967) co-authored the book What is Futurism? Answer, in which they claimed that Dada, which means childish wilfulness in Japanese, has the same value and function as a child's drawings, being purely formalistic and without agenda: a stance which drastically undermines Dadaist radicalism.30 For Makoto Ueda, confusion over the meaning of the word Dada had a huge developmental impact on Shinkichi, showing him that a word meaning "a wooden horse" in French can mean "yes" in Rumanian, rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 9

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that things seeming meaningless on the surface can be meaningful in another sphere;31 this resonated with his own practice of Zen deconstruction. The problem I wish to address, therefore, is how specific cultural differences undermine the radicalism of an imported avant-garde in Japan. Since the work of Shinkichi was non-radical and synthetic, it is necessary to examine the work of MAVO in order to uncover whether Dada could take a radical political position within Japan.

MAVO Radicalism MAVO was a small but significant group of around five practitioners, and had a strongly Dadaist inflection through the presence of the leader and codifier of the group, Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901-77). Murayama had spent time in Berlin in the very early 1920s, where he became interested in both Dada and Constructivism. Whilst Constructivism undeniably played a more important role in the aesthetics of MAVO production, the first MAVO manifesto of 1923 expressed a similar interest in affirmation and negation as Shinkichi's Dada, and revealed the influence of Dada's anarchism and linguistic ambiguity, describing the group as a negative entity. In August 1923, MAVO expanded on this anarchism by staging protests at the Nikaten exhibition. Nikaten was an alternative exhibition to the official academy, where avant-gardists showed their work. The MAVO protest was tenuously premised on the mistaken selection of a work by Sumiya Iwane, a painter affiliated to the MAVO group, on the belief that it was painted by a Western artist, and the subsequent embarrassment of the author when the mistake was uncovered and he was asked to remove the work.32 The protest disproportionately escalated into an attempt to vandalise the exhibition hall. The police were called and they tried to halt the protest on the basis that it contravened the Peace Preservation Law, the same legislation used to detain political subversives and the Surrealists later in the 1930s and 40s. Social critique was an important part of the MAVO project.33 Aside from their exhibition protests and their dislike of the academy, MAVO took part in decoration and construction projects in the barracks and slum houses that had been quickly erected following the earthquake to house the dispossessed, integrating art, life and social action in a way that challenged the academy. rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 10

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For their social concerns and anarchist spirit, MAVO were frequently persecuted and arrested. Masamu Yanase (1900-45), a MAVO member who also worked as a satirical cartoonist, was frequently investigated and imprisoned. Yanase produced anti-military sketches immediately after the Kanto earthquake, bringing him under suspicion, and was imprisoned in 1933 after having made contact with the Comintern whilst in Shanghai, making him guilty of political subversion against the Japanese state. However, it is important to remember that this imprisonment, and Yanase's affiliation with formal political activism, post-dated the dissolution of MAVO; by the time these events unfolded, Yanase was instead an active member of the Proletarian Artist's League, an organisation which appropriated politicallyminded Japanese avant-gardists, divorcing them from their artistic groups, movements and contexts. Thus, as artists left their collectives and joined the League, this created a vacuum of political participation in the rest of the avantgarde. Despite the anti-establishment and social interventions of MAVO, which are important achievements for the development of the avant-garde in Japan, they failed to make anything uniquely Japanese. Murayama had complained of the 1923 Conscious Constructivist exhibition, Tokyo that it was filled with dry copies of French art,34 yet, as Gennifer Weisenfeld, the only Western scholar to have written on MAVO, has observed: [...] Murayama did not create any of the stylistic idioms he employed; he and the other Mavoists instead adapted current ideas selectively35 resulting in a mish-mashed Dada-Constructivism which resists historical or geographical positioning, thereby achieving a derivative internationalism in contrast to the recognisably Japanese innovations of the Surrealists. Thus it is in activism, rather than in aesthetics, that MAVO made their greatest contribution to Japanese avant-gardism, but their activism was not entirely unproblematic either, and some MAVO members became disillusioned with its radicalism. July 1924 saw the publication of the first issue of MAVO magazine, in advertising material for which they threatened that: MAVO is a group of completely blue criminals [...] Lazily, like pigs, like weeds, like the trembling emotions of sexual desire, we rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 11

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are the last bombs that rain down on all the intellectual criminals (including the bourgeoisie cliques) who swim in this world36a statement which seems to resonate with Breton's later description of the perfect Surrealist act as firing at random into a crowd.37 It was this kind of violent tone that led MAVO into trouble with the police, just as the anti-militarism and violent anti-clericalism of the French Surrealists would later do. MAVO's strongly revolutionary stance, now committed to print, alienated members including Kamenosuke Ogata and Shuzo Ooura, both of whom withdrew in 1924 after the publication of the third issue,38 which failed to pass censors not only because of its violence and repeated reference to bombs, but also due to the firecracker attached to the front cover.39 Tensions between artistic and political radicalism amongst MAVO members was a feature that can not only be found in the later Surrealist movement, but also in contemporary European Dada. From the time of the Barrs trial (1921), Breton's use of Dada for ideological purposes had been divisive and was perceived as misguided by Tzara.40 Like Tzara, Shinkichi complained that Dada in Japan was misunderstood by certain communists and anarchists who felt it should have served as a driving force for revolution and slaughter,41 which conflicted with his interests in negation and Zen. For Shinkichi, disillusionment with political radicalism was instrumental in the secession of Surrealism from Dada,42 presenting Surrealism as a less politicised, less destructive movement than Dada. Thus, avant-gardists in Japan were becoming disillusioned with attempts to link artistic practice with political interventions from 1924, pre-dating the disillusionment of French Surrealists with political radicalism by eight years.43 Weisenfeld's work on MAVO offers an excellent analysis of political complications in the discussion of Japanese Dada. She notes that the expectation that Japanese Dadaism will be politically radical arises from a conflation of the European and Japanese contexts, and overlooks the fact that Dada was not a monolith.44 Historiographical issues such as these have also affected the reception of Surrealism. Dada's destruction enjoyed a mixed reception in Japan. Whilst some, such as the littrateur Chtar Kawasaki, saw it as having political valency; others, including the painter Zennosuke Tamamura (1893-1951), whose own practice sought to forge an avant-garde rebus Issue 4 Autumn/Winter 2009 12

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from the techniques and motifs used in pre-modern Japanese painting, and who was the financial backer for the Dadaist periodical GGPG,45 saw Dada's radicalism as an aesthetic gesture.46 Thus during the supposedly liberal 1920s the relevancy of the political contents of imported Western movements was already being questioned, proving that an apolitical, aesthetic stance was not adopted by avant-gardists solely as a way of circumnavigating the demands of a repressive state during the Second World War. Indeed, the split between Shinkichi's aestheticised, Tzara-influenced practice, and the radicalism of the Berlin-orientated Mavoists, proves that in both the European and Japanese cases, avant-gardists could chose to pursue 'radicalism' in either political or formalist directions, undermining claims that the absence of politics from the oeuvres of particular Japanese avant-gardists represents a failure to understand the nature of the avant-garde.

Peter Brger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): xv, defines modernism by means of its opposition to traditional praxis. Scholars of modernism in Japan, such as William Gardner and Tsuruoka Yoshihisa, have taken a similar stance in claiming that the use of art-historical precedent marked a recourse to traditional or nationalist values, symptomatic of acquiescence to wartime ideologies, and against the spirit of modernist experimentation (op. cit. notes 22 and 23). 2 Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzabur: Modernism in Translation (New Jersey: Princteon University Press, 1993): 9. 3 Aside from Shinkichi, Jun Tsuji and Yoshiyuki Eisuke were also active Dadaists and collaborated with Shinkichi in publications, conferences, and the running of a Cafe Dada in Tokyo, based on the Cabaret Voltaire. See Rudolf Kuenzli (ed.), Dada (London: Phaidon, 2006) for a full account. 4 See Dawn Ades, Dada-Constructivism, in Richard Hertz and Norman M. Klein, eds, Twentieth Century Art History: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1990): 70-80. 5 Toshiharu Omuka, Tada Dada (Devotedly Dada) For the Stage: the Japanese Movement 1920-1925, in Stephen Foster (ed.), Crisis in the Arts, volume 4: The Eastern Dada Orbit: 223-310, 276. 6 Ibid: 276. 7 Ibid: 276. 8 John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: Kitasono Katue (London: Harvard University Press, 1999): 28 9 See Ko Won, Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets (New York: New York University Press, 1977): 16; and Toshiharu Omuka, Tada Dada. 10 Won: 4. 11 Ibid: 5. 12 Ibid: 65. 13 Ibid: 88. 14 Ibid: 85. 15 Shinkichi's Revival of Dada; in Dada to Zen (1971), quoted in ibid: 84. 16 Won: 84.

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Tzara 1922 lecture on Dada, quoted in Won: v. Quoted in Won: 84. 19 Ueda: 339. 20 Stephen Addiss, The Art of Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks 1600-1925 (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc,1989): 8. 21 Ibid: 8. 22 Tsuruoka Yoshihisa, The Discovery of Surrealism, 1979, quoted in Culver, Annika A., "Between Distant Realities": The Japanese Avant-Garde, Surrealism, and the Colonies, 19241943, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007: 3. 23 William Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (London: Harvard University Press, 2006): 69. 24 Takashi Ikemoto, Introduction, in AFTERIMAGES: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi, trans. Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto (London: London Magazine Editions, 1971): 13-26, 22. 25 Hiroshi Nara, Introduction, in Hiroshi, ed., Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts (Lexington Books, Plymouth, 2007): 1-13, 1. 26 Ibid: 12. 27 Linhartov, Vra, Notes en marge de lexposition, Nihon no Shureriarisumu 1925-1945, ex cat (Nagoya City Art Museum, 1990): 14-15. 28 Takamura Kotar, Midori no Taiy, first published in Subaru, 2-4, April, 1910, pp. 23-9, reproduced in Kotar, A Brief History of Imbecility, trans. Hiroaki Sato (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992): 180-6. 29 Shz Takiguchi, Document IV, February 1941, quoted in John Clark, Surrealism in Japan, (Monash Asia Institute, 1997): 15. 30 Quoted in Omuka: 251. 31 Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press): 339. 32 Gennifer Weisenfeld, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (London: University of California Press, 2002): 77. 33 Ibid: 1-2. 34 Ibid: 37. 35 Ibid: 138. 36 Announcement flyer for MAVO magazine, 1924, quoted in Kuenzli (ed.), Dada: 272. 37 Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1929. 38 Weisenfeld: 97. 39 Ibid: 97. 40 Durozoi: 24. 41 Won: 87. 42 Ibid: 88. 43 This citation of the disillusionment of French Surrealists with Communism to the early 1930s is based on Louis Aragon's departure from the Surrealist movement in 1932, on the basis that he no longer felt Surrealism and Communism were compatible interests, and Breton's expulsion from the French Communist Party in 1933. 44 Weisenfeld: 159. 45 Solt: 30. 46 Omuka: 231.
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Majella Munro is a PhD candidate at the University of Essex, researching the development of Surrealism in Japan. Her first book, on Japanese erotic art, was published by Erotic Review Books in November 2008. Majella is a founding editor of Modern Art Asia, an online peerreviewed postgraduate journal dedicated to Asian art. She can be contacted through her website, majellamunro.com.

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